Unpopular Opinions

 

The Prime Minister announced that one of the new budget initiatives would be 'investment in AI training'.

Well, the country will not need to spend any money on me because I won't use it.  Period.  The books pictured above were all written by me, long before AI or LLM were sparkles in anyone's eye.  I will continue to generate content out of my knowledge and skill pertaining to a rather complex craft that has multiple layers of information.  As far as I am concerned, there is NO room for AI in the field of weaving.  At least for the understanding of the principles of the craft, and understanding the marriage of the weaver, their body, their loom and the yarn they choose to work with.  There may be other tasks they could do well enough but I don't need those services, so...

Then this morning I answered a fairly simple/basic question on a chat group and a Reply Guy responded rather rudely.  He demanded to know what had 'informed' that answer.  I told him my 50 years of weaving while paying attention to the results.

As regular readers of this blog are well aware, I have been struggling for years with health issues that are adversely affecting my ability to weave, and every trip to the loom is part therapy as well as an exercise in discovering more about the craft - how threads interact with each other, in the loom, and during wet finishing.

Plus the current events lately, and the scorn in his 'reply' was not going to be ignored.  Not today, Reply Guy.  Not on this day.

I rarely respond to Reply Guys, but today I did.  Do I regret it?  Maybe.  But not at the minute.  I'm tired of Reply Guys telling me I know nothing.  It happens less now as I've limited my participation on public chat groups.  Perhaps I ought to have introduced myself when I joined the group.  But the people who know me, know me, and I thought that my answers (when I made them) would at least introduce me (and my knowledge) to the newer weavers and let them know that I had knowledge that they might consider.

It is no secret to me that I do NOT have 'all the answers'.  But I have a broad base of experience in designing and weaving a large range of qualities of cloth.  I can usually make an informed guess.  If I can't, I won't reply and let someone else respond.  

But weaving is as deep as it is wide.  OTOH, there are quite literally dozens of books that will present information on various facets of the craft.  And now the attitude is to ask the the 'secret', the magic potion to make 'perfect' cloth on their 3rd warp.

There are a lucky few who come to the craft with excellent fine motor skills, and a knowledge of working with textiles so they do have some experience working with thread.  But every new weaver's question(s) are generally found between the covers of multiple books.

Some are 'historical' (as in written in the 19th and 20th century with a few more in this), but the principles remain the same.  The language may seem 'stilted', the photos may be grainy black and white, authors may differ in minor ways.  But essentially the principles remain the same up to even this very day.

One of the founding principles to any 'practice' of weaving is weave the samples you need to find out what is going to happen.  Don't take my word for it.  I can point you in a direction.  And then you have to figure out where it is you actually want to wind up.  And you do *that* by setting up the loom, with the yarn you intend to use, in the colour(s) you want to use, weave the sample and wet finish it.

If it doesn't turn out the way you want, back to the drawing board, figure out what needs to change to bring you closer to your goal.

Seems like today is another day to post the links to my personal set of resources...

Classes

School of Sweet Georgia (four classes)

Long Tthread Media (Handwoven)

Books

All 3 above available at blurb.com with a fourth available in my ko-fi shop - A Thread Runs Through It - pdf download only